I recently downloaded Frank Turner’s (relatively) new album, England Keep My Bones and was delighted to find what is now my favorite hymn!

~ Doc B.

Not again.

She celebrates it with grilled leg of lamb, the company of loved ones, a respectful nod to her friends and family counted amongst the Rational Faithful, and with these scary, scary Peep cupcakes. Yes. Yes, I made these carcinogenic little morsels.

Nicole Bobek, who won the 1995 U.S. Figure Skating Championship and was a member of the 1998 Olympic team, was arrested on Monday on charges that she had conspired to distribute methamphetamine.

The picture on the left is from 1998, when she represented the United States in Nagano. On the right is her arrest mug shot.

Bobek is not the only distaff figure skater, foreign or domestic, to run significantly afoul of the law. In 1997, Oksana Baiul, the Ukranian who won Olympic gold in 1994, drunkenly crashed her luxury car into a tree in Connecticut. (Baiul seems to have put that incident far behind her, however.) And few could forget the bizarre 1994 drama involving Tonya Harding, who along with her ex-husband and a couple of other dignitaries was part of a conspiracy to club fellow American skater Nancy Kerrigan on the knee during the U.S. Championships. Harding won that event, while Kerrigan was forced to withdraw; at the subsequent Olympics, however, Harding finished eighth and Kerrigan took the Silver medal. (Kerrigan herself, some will recall, was caught on microphone at a Walt Disney World publicity parade saying, “This is dumb. I hate it. This is the most corniest [sic] thing I have ever done.” Although Disney was her sponsor, she has nothing but high praise from me for implicitly laying into those assholes.)

There must be a message in here somewhere for parents whose daughters express an interest in figure skating. Sure, let them do it, but by all means make sure they suck at it–an unusual number of champions seem to pay a heavy price.

This popped up on New Scientist’s online news this morning: Christians battle each other over evolution by Amanda Gefter.

So the Discovery Institute insists that to be a Christian means that theory of evolution must be rejected as espoused in their new Faith and Evolution web site. The web site, Geftner speculates, may be a response to Francis Collin’s launch of the BioLogos Foundation. Collins and crew — with funding from the Templeton Foundation — are proponents of theistic evolution which purports that the supreme being of Christianity chose to create life via evolution.

That actually sounds much like the belief of the minister of my childhood church (United Methodist). Rev. M. loved science, was fascinated by modern cosmology, embraced the theory of evolution, and in fact was a substitute science teacher at my high school. I daresay he’d look askance at being told he could not be a Christian for his scientific inclinations.

Strictly speaking, he was a creationist (divine hand behind the Big Bang, etc.). I recall a sermon in which he compared the imagery of an atom to a galaxy (a loose connection to physical laws) as a tribute to the Christian supreme being. To his credit, he never conflated God with science in the public high school classroom. So even if the magisteria of faith and science might have become entangled when he stood at the pulpit, they certainly did not when he spoke in the secular public arena.

So this is what concerns me about Francis Collins. He’s speaking from the pulpit on BioLogos — analogous to Rev. M’s paean to God via atoms to galaxies. However, Collins is rumored to be a potential pick for head of the NIH. Will he be able to keep the magisteria non-overlapping in a secular venue?

To echo Gefter, allowing the magisteria of faith and science to become entangled serves neither well. The DI’ers and BioLogos just conflate them in different ways.

Now that I’ve expended my quota of navel-gazing for the year and probably for 2009 as well, I can go back to posting like an asshole.
I suppose this is interesting mainly for its novelty. I can’t even feign surprise at the vacuity of the nutter droning on about how American Christians have served as a model of tolerance for the rest of the world to aspire to. He said it with a straight face, but he’s still crazy. Hell, they can’t even tolerate each other, much less people of other religions, homos, and the rest of us. Then again, the newsies always seek to find the most extreme of the extreme, and I don’t pretend that Bob Enyart is representative of anything or anyone besides his own quaintly childish points of view.
One thing that did strike me about the article was its classic wording:
Eleven billboards in have gone up in metro Denver and Colorado Springs that question the existence of God.
Bullshit. The billboards do not merely “question” anything, they state categorically what their creators believe know. You wouldn’t ever see a standard, pro-religion (or neutral) article claiming that people merely “question” atheists. This is demonstrative of the current state of thinking in America, somewhat ironic in light of what this piece is about.
Finally, since I’m obligated to piss on everyone and everything, I will note my own shock at what a hillbilly town Colorado Springs seemed to be when I spent four weeks there as a member of the U.S. Army in 1996. A cowboy town. I had envisioned in my naivete all of Colorado being a Boulder-esque, runner-and-cyclist-charged bastion of stoner-happy progressivity, and I was dead fucking wrong on that score. Still, it’s a beautiful-ass place. I got to see both Pike’s Peak and the Royal Gorge Bridge in the same weekend, and there are not many parts of the country that offer that luxury.
I filed this under “Doc B’s Big Bag of What the Hell” just because I never noticed that category, and because I can.

A couple of posts back, I plugged the Spore game a bit, and I see that proprietor of Pharyngula asks if anyone has played the game yet? PZ shrugs his skeptical shoulders and says insouciantly (well, maybe…I just like the adverb):

I’ve played with the creature creator, which is actually rather fun…but it’s really just the most elaborate version of Mr Potatohead ever designed. What I’ve seen of the game itself puts me off a bit, though. It’s not going to teach one single thing about evolution, and actually teaches several things that are anti-evolutionary. It’s a design toy, not any kind of evolution simulator, but people are gushing over it as if it might actually improve the image of evolutionary biology.

Based on my admittedly limited experience with the Spore Creature Creator, I agree to a certain extent with this, but it might just spark some interest in evolutionary biology even if it doesn’t smack of full-blown accuracy. You know, sort of a gateway thing. I mean, the pulp science fiction stories I read as a kid weren’t scientifically accurate, but they did set my imagination to soaring and thinking about scientific principles. This new video game might just do that to young minds receptive to such things.
Like PZ’s Skatje, the elder fruit o’ my womb has been encouraging me to check the game out. Spawn the Elder is a video game fan boy, but he’s also an evo-devo fan boy, having read the popular books written by Sean B. Carroll and Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart (Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, respectively) so he views the game with the appropriate perspective. Thus, he, along with his old mother (that would be me), was thrilled to watch the National Geographic Channel’s program last night, How to Build a Better Being. [Yes, you must suffer through an advertisement if you watch the clip from MSN-TV's "The First Ten Minutes." Long live running dog capitalist Amerika!]
Although the PR bits that I received in the Chimp Refuge banana box implied at a cursory glance that this might be a documentary about Spore itself, I was delighted to see that the major focus by far was on evo-devo.
The NGC program was very well done. The concepts of hox genes as “genetic tool kits” and how these play into development, morphology and evolution were presented at a level that a scientifically curious layperson could readily comprehend, certainly a bright middle-schooler. The scientists interviewed expressed a true joy and infectious excitement about their research. From fruit flies to Tiktaalik (the fossil fish) to the human hand to the radula of an abalone, the interconnectedness of life’s “genetic tool kit” is illustrated in a very accessible way. The laconic but clearly curious and intelligent Will Wright, the creator of Spore, acted as the nominative “host.”
Spawn the Elder and I really geeked out over this TV show. And what precipitated it? A plug for a video game. So even if “Spore” doesn’t reflect absolute accuracy of evolutionary processes, the fact that evo-devo showed up in popular culture, even if it is on the high numbers of cable TV, made me swoon!
I highly recommend the NGC program. Catch it on the rebound.

Time for a new category here at the Refuge, namely “Hokey Haiku“. It’s just a fun way to communicate a simple thought or observation of the day in a mere 17 syllables. Don’t expect Robert Frost or e.e.cummings though.
Summer’s vanishing
Where is my calculator?
The semester starts
Yep. I’m back on campus.

The lead article in Salon’s newsletter caught my eye this morning when I perused the ol’ Google-mail Inbox. Under the auspices of Salon’s “Atoms and Eden: Conversations About Science and Faith,” Steve Paulson interviews James Carse (retired director of NYU’s Religious Studies Program) in Religion is Poetry. The byline: “The beauties of religion need to be saved from both the true believers and the trendy atheists, argues compelling religious scholar James Carse.” The interview comes on the heels of the publication of Carse’s new book, The Religious Case Against Belief.
Cerberus guards the gates of Salon in the form of advertisements, but this provocative interview is worth the read. So are the letters submitted in response to the interview.

Read the rest of this entry »

So AfterElton: News, Reviews and Commentary on Gay and Bisexual Men in Entertainment and the Media just released their choices for the Hot 100 Men List. Granted, this may smack of exploitation a la Maxim’s list of “hot women,” but it prompts me to offer a short list of Guys Who Hang Out (Figuratively) at the Refuge Whom I Appreciate:
The Right Reverend Big Dumb Chimp. Sheer animal magnetism.
The incomparable Warren of The Indigestible. More than a delicious mouthful!
Saint Gasoline. Hot. Inflammatory. Don’t pull his finger.
The luscious SDC a.k.a. mistaSteve of Words of Advice for Young People. Don’t let that droll Hoosier humor lull you into thinking this guy is harmless.
Although they are not bloggers (as far as I know), I give honorable mention and the empty promise of a grooming session to the following fellas who often comment here:
hopper
J-Dog
Bill from Dover
Dr. Eye
gingerbaker
Although no one will ever replace the dudes of the erstwhile FrinkTank in my heart, the fellows above regularly put a smile on my wizened old face.

So AfterElton: News, Reviews and Commentary on Gay and Bisexual Men in Entertainment and the Media just released their choices for the Hot 100 Men List. Granted, this may smack of exploitation a la Maxim’s list of “hot women,” but it prompts me to offer a short list of Guys Who Hang Out (Figuratively) at the Refuge Whom I Appreciate:
The Right Reverend Big Dumb Chimp. Sheer animal magnetism.
The incomparable Warren of The Indigestible. More than a delicious mouthful!
Saint Gasoline. Hot. Inflammatory. Don’t pull his finger.
The luscious SDC a.k.a. mistaSteve of Words of Advice for Young People. Don’t let that droll Hoosier humor lull you into thinking this guy is harmless.
Although they are not bloggers (as far as I know), I give honorable mention and the empty promise of a grooming session to the following fellas who often comment here:
hopper
J-Dog
Bill from Dover
Dr. Eye
gingerbaker
Although no one will ever replace the dudes of the erstwhile FrinkTank in my heart, the fellows above regularly put a smile on my wizened old face.

Bill O’Reilly’s meltdown thanks to a hapless teleprompter is making the rounds again; I saw it on The Colbert Report. Thanks to the wonders of technology, someone has constructed a dance remix of Bill blowing a gasket. Pant-hoot to Bill from Dover for passing this along. Word has it that he found it on the Daily Kos. It’s also resides on boing boing.
Warning: Language is NSFW. Well, maybe it depends on where you work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Due to a conversation regarding facts and theories on a message board I sometimes visit, I decided to write a short item for my students answering a simple question:
“If a fact is fundamentally true, isn’t it better than a theory?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Due to a conversation regarding facts and theories on a message board I sometimes visit, I decided to write a short item for my students answering a simple question:
“If a fact is fundamentally true, isn’t it better than a theory?”

Read the rest of this entry »

This is blog is as good a place as any to briefly visit a subject that, along with my own perspective, is not at all new. Nor will it go away.

Read the rest of this entry »